 weaknesses as well as the virtues both of his
situation and of his birth. It would, perhaps, have been more observant of
reality to have drawn him of less moral elevation, but it would have also been
less attractive; and the business of a writer of fiction is to approach, as near
as his powers will allow, to poetry. After this avowal, it is scarcely necessary
to add, that individual character had little to do with either the conception or
the filling up of this fanciful personage. It was believed that enough had been
sacrificed to truth in preserving the language and the dramatic keeping
necessary to the part.
    In point of fact, the country which is the scene of the following tale has
undergone as little change, since the historical events alluded to had place, as
almost any other district of equal extent within the whole limits of the United
States. There are fashionable and well-attended watering-places at and near the
spring where Hawk-eye halted to drink, and roads traverse the forests where he
and his friends were compelled to journey without even a path. Glenn's has a
large village; and while William Henry, and even a fortress of later date, are
only to be traced as ruins, there is another village on the shores of the
Horican. But, beyond this, the enterprise and energy of a people who have done
so much in other places have done little here. The whole of that wilderness, in
which the latter incidents of the legend occurred is nearly a wilderness still,
though the red man has entirely deserted this part of the state. Of all the
tribes named in these pages, there exist only a few half-civilised beings of the
Oneidas, on the reservations of their people in New York. The rest have
disappeared, either from the regions in which their fathers dwelt, or altogether
from the earth.
 
There is one point on which we would wish to say a word before closing this
preface. Hawk-eye calls the Lac du Saint Sacrement, the Horican. As we believe
this to be an appropriation of the name that has its origin with ourselves, the
time has arrived, perhaps, when the fact should be frankly admitted. While
writing this book, fully a quarter of a century since, it occurred to us that
the French name of this lake was too complicated, the American too commonplace,
and the Indian too unpronounceable, for either to be used familiarly in a work
of fiction. Looking over an ancient map, it was ascertained that a tribe of
Indians, called Les Horicans by the French, existed
